Most consumers of entertainment seem to prefer live-action to animation. Why do you suppose this is?

When I think of The Little Mermaid being made into a live action adaptation, or for One Piece on Netflix to be going through the same transformation...I wonder why we have such a push to make things that were cartoons/anime into live action adaptations. For example, you could argue that One Piece (as my "go to" example of this phenomenon) is already reaching its audience. It is the 3rd most popular show on Crunchyroll, and it airs on American cable every Saturday. But here's the thing.

Cartoons and anime reach a fraction of the audience that live-action properties do. For instance, recent episodes of One Piece have brought in around 2.39 million viewers on live television. That's a lot of people, but in comparison HBO's House of the Dragon which was a Game of Thrones spinoff, was regularly averaging over 25 million viewers per episode. For the spinoff of a show with a legendarily bad ending, this is phenomenal (the final season of Game of Thrones averaged over 40 million viewers per episode).

So it is apparent that there are other levels of recognition that studios who pump out animated films/cartoons might be reaching for. In other words, they want their property to have some esteem that exists without dismissal, because "comics and cartoons are for babies." To be more succinct, if you want your story to be taken seriously, live-action is where it's at. And it seems like it always will be. It's not fair or right, but it just is. I do wonder though as to why this happened? I mean...why is everything that is animated associated with "being childish?" And why do we heap so much legitimacy on a film that features live actors?

Maybe the answer is that animation when it is shown without promotion has bright colors that tend to be attractive toward kids. If we see a lot of kids gravitating toward a show, then it is probably natural for us all to begin to associate that show as being "childish." And maybe another answer is that live-action can offer a sense of realism that animation just fails at doing.

Anyone else have any opinions on this? Are you a person who prefers live-action to animation? If so, I'd like to know why.

For the May 2023 IWSG I talk about what inspires me to write.

Guardians of the Galaxy 3 is out this week, which means that May has finally arrived in my brain. I kinda have this weird calendar in my head where I associate certain times with movies or television I want to see. For example, Spiderman: Across the Spider-Verse comes out in the first week of June, and then Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is essentially the July 4th movie this year. So, I know when that movie hits theaters that it is time for fireworks. And Ahsoka (the Disney+ series) is what I'm looking forward to for August. By the time that hits, I know that summer has only got a few weeks left in it, so I'd better suck it up.

But being the first week of May is also exciting because it means that it is time for another Insecure Writer's Support Group post. You can find all about that HERE and even sign up if you'd like. And to tell you a little bit about the IWSG, I've borrowed some of their words from the sign-up page.

First off, what is the purpose of the IWSG?: It's to share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a safe haven for insecure writers of all kinds.

Second, when do y'all post?: The first Wednesday of every month is officially Insecure Writer’s Support Group day. This is the day you are supposed to post your thoughts on your own blog. You might talk about your doubts and the fears you have conquered. Or you might discuss your struggles and triumphs and offer a word of encouragement for others who are struggling. Another thing you could do is visit others in the group and connect with your fellow writer - aim for a dozen new people each time - and return comments. This group is all about connecting. Be sure to link to this page and display the badge in your post. And please be sure your avatar links back to your blog! Otherwise, when you leave a comment, people can't find you to comment back.

The Twitter handle for the Insecure Writer's Support Group is @TheIWSG and the hashtag that everyone uses is #IWSG.

The awesome co-hosts for the May 3 posting of the IWSG are Joylene Nowell Butler, Ronel Janse van Vuuren, Meka James, Victoria Marie Lees, and M Louise Barbour!

Now, every month the IWSG also announces a question that members can answer in their IWSG post. These questions may prompt someone like yourself to share advice, insight, a personal experience or story. If you choose to do the question, then you should include your answer to the question in your IWSG post or let it inspire your post if you are struggling with something to say.

And this is where I tell you that I'm answering the question this month. So without further ado, here is the May 3rd question:

When you are working on a story, what inspires you?

I mostly get inspired by art. Music can inspire me to imagine a scene. A picture or a painting can leave me filled with a story that I must get written down. Another thing that inspires me is interacting and connecting with another person. That "connection" can be a strong driver for creative output. So, I think that those are the three things that inspire me the most to do the creative writing that I enjoy.

Thanks for visiting.

Trauma responses to modern life are everywhere if you know what to look for.

Trauma responses are a thing I think about a lot these days. Life in 2023 is as hard as it ever has been. The dollar is worth much less than it ever was, housing consumes more of everyone's paycheck, nothing seems to be built well anymore, scammers are everywhere trying to steal your information probably so that they can meet ends meet wherever they happen to be, and people are afraid of gun violence moreso than at any other time in history that I can remember. With my new roommates being just about two months old at this point, one of them said at the table the other day, "This is the first time in a long time when I have some stability in my life." That struck a chord with me, and I suppose I'm glad that I could provide some stability to someone that may have needed it a lot more than I originally anticipated.

Additionally, I have new friends who are all starting to let their trauma responses show. One of them, an adult woman of almost forty, apparently has no ability to have crucial conversations. She's as fragile as glass, and her trauma response is to behave like a little kid and run and hide from any responsibilities or being held accountable for anything that she has done. It's a fascinating thing to watch...this forty something woman to become red-faced and about ready to plunge over whatever mental cliff they have erected in their minds over some very minor things. I remarked, "Your inability to meet any conflict must really result in you living a shitty life." And yes, it turns out she lives a shitty life in a trailer park with her mom who will die of old age someday and who knows what will happen to this person.

So, yeah. I've thought about trauma responses a lot lately. I have no idea what "trauma" people are suffering. It is probably all different. But to say that things aren't getting tougher between inflation, credential inflation, extreme weather, and you name what all else that comes your way, and I'm noticing a pattern. And here's the rub: most neurotypical people do not enjoy (or suffer) people who are having a meltdown due to a trauma response. So we get really good at boundary making, and we shunt those people to the other side of the boundary. Boundaries (afterall) are healthy for everyone. But then I read that there is now a "loneliness" epidemic in the country. Don't believe me? Look it up online. There are lots of articles that point to loneliness being a problem for everyone. Birth rates are going down, people are living alone in homes to a greater extent than at any time in the past, and no one seems to be able to point to any one thing. But I think I know the answer. I have a hypothesis as to why people are so lonely. Here it is.

I think people are so lonely because we all can't stand each other anymore. There is so much trauma happening to everyone at everyplace due to all of the things that run the gamut of all the things I've mentioned above. It's trauma, trauma, trauma...followed immediately by response, response, response. And the thing is...no one likes the "response." Because people having a trauma response are essentially traumatizing someone else. In other words, the "conflict" is something that most people say, "Nope...you need therapy! Do not thrust your shit on me!" And so that leads to people living alone and then suddenly, you've got an entire population who is lonely. Connecting on social media is the only way people feel safe getting together anymore, because as soon as the trauma response is "detected" you can block that stuff and still feel safe. Safe...until society itself starts to unravel at the seams and you get things like "gun violence" from people who have gotten so angry from being isolated (or who are having some other "trauma response" whatever that happens to be) and they go and grab a gun and decide to "balance the scales."

Anyway, that's my hypothesis. For what it's worth, I'm sitting in a pretty good place mentally these days, and I'm grateful for the safety and stability I feel in my own life. But that stability has allowed me an excellent vista for me to look out and see things. I now wonder how much more trauma the people who are not me (who are living in our shared society) can take in the various forms of abuse that can be dished out by employers, by creditors, by educational institutions, by bullies who might say they are your friends, by religious fanatics, and by the truly mentally ill who are unhoused and wandering our streets. I wonder what the breaking point is? What does that look like? And will that reckoning that is sure to come be absolutely awful? And then...the final question: why were we (who saw it coming) so powerless to do anything about it?

Today I learned about the knights of capitalism.

Today I learned about Pinkertons, a.k.a., the knights of capitalism. These guys have a long history of defending capitalism in strategic ways. From busting up strikes to seizing property for corporations, learning about Pinkertons was very interesting, and made me lose a little respect for capitalism in general (I know...the amount of respect I had for capitalism has been at an all-time low lately). But you do not want to run into these guys unless you have your own private army. Why? Because they essentially are a private army.

So, how did I learn about Pinkerton Detective Agency? Wizards of the Coast sicked them on a guy that got some stolen Magic cards that had yet to be released and who was showing them on his Youtube channel. Pinkertons showed up at his door and were very aggressive, even making the guy's wife cry. The agents claimed he was in possession of stolen goods and they threatened him with escalation to law enforcement, from one to ten years in jail, legal fees, and $200,000 in fines. 

I'm embedding a video below that you should watch if you want to know more about Pinkerton Detective Agency. These goons are "real life" men in black. It's pretty weird to say this in 2023, but there you are. I wonder if they could be featured in a story in some way. They seem like quite colorful characters, if you manage to stay out of their crosshairs. We all like to think that society follows rules of etiquette, and that the only kind of trouble we can get into is from police. But there are all kinds of ways to get into trouble that a lot of us know nothing about, and Pinkerton's is just one of those many ways.

A Rated-R Kraven the Hunter movie is coming later this year and I have some questions.

I learned today that Aaron Taylor-Johnson is going to be Kraven the Hunter in the Marvel movie when it comes out in October. This is old news for a lot of people. But I liked Aaron Taylor-Johnson in Kickass, in Godzilla, and in Avengers: Age of Ultron. As an aside, I still can't believe he got so swole between Kickass and his other movies but lots of young men go through this kind of transformation these days with things like Crossfit, personal trainers and gyms, and body shaming being ubiquitous in schools built within neighborhoods of privilege. That and protein, protein, protein. So, because I like Aaron Taylor-Johnson, I will probably go and see this show in the theater on opening weekend. But that doesn't mean I don't have questions.

The big one that I have is why are we getting this movie in the first place? I mean...I've read a few Spiderman comics. I even subscribed to them back in the nineties and had a "box" at the local comic book store where I could pick up my issues. But I was never excited to read the Kraven the Hunter storylines when they showed up. I was always just wanting more Peter Parker. The next question I have is why is this thing going to be rated-R? It seems like an odd choice made by Sony unless you consider that Joaquin Phoenix's Joker was also rated-R, and it made a ton of money (it joined the billion dollar club). So is Sony trying to make its own Joker? Apparently, the answer is yes. But is it the right thing to do? Should we be excited by this? To answer these questions requires us to look at history just a wee bit.

The comic books all of these characters appeared in were all approved by the Comic Code Authority, and later on, they were rated Teen (13+). That also included Kraven's Last Hunt, which is a story a lot of people love. So, by this alone, an "R-rating" doesn't make any sense. Times have also changed a lot though. Back in the 1960's, being a "big game hunter" was respected, and it had an element of "cool" to it. So Kraven the Hunter would have had this formidable aura about him of man vs. beast that just doesn't exist anymore. These days, big game hunting elicits an "Ewww...what an @$$hole" vibe, because it is mostly just rich white douches shooting staged hunts and killing endangered animals. I'm not seeing how they could make this character (in any way) sympathetic.

But then again, Joker was a character that wasn't originally meant to be rated-R. But it does work now because the R-rating shows how damaged he is (mentally) while making him a mirror for society. He is in many ways an everyman now. Joker is an allegory for the modern world's ills (and the problem with gun violence in America). There's a ton of stuff there to sympathize with. But Kraven? He's just a rich dude that claims to fight animals fairly, but he also takes a magic potion to give him super strength, speed, etc. Kraven could be really interesting if Sony could work a deal with Disney and thus obtain some X-Men rights to use the Savage Land, which is the prehistoric area that is attached to Antarctica. Dinosaurs are both big game and deemed acceptable to hunt by modern standards. So that would get rid of the "ewww" factor. But Sony doesn't have X-Men rights. They only have Spiderman to work with (at least as far as I know).

Anyone else out there (reading my words) have any thoughts about a Kraven the Hunter movie?

The Strange New World's season two trailer makes me giddy with excitement.

 I saw that the Strange New Worlds season 2 trailer dropped this weekend. This is a show that I very much enjoy. I'm embedding it below so that you can watch it too. And I'm also going to share a few of my observations about it right now:

1) Pike's hair gets more majestic with every episode. It really does.

2) The actor who plays Kirk is more handsome than the original Shatner. I love that we get these iconic characters played by other actors.

3) I hope they continue with the Spock and Chapel stuff that they started in season one.

4) There will probably be more Gorn, and that's a good thing. The gorn were a pleasant surprise from last season.

5) Is there time travel happening this next season? The revolving door that Kirk has trouble dealing with seems to be hinting at some time travel. It wouldn't be a Star Trek show without at least a little time travel.

6) This is more my jam. I'm kinda over Picard.

Are you scared of A.I.?

So...it's happened now. A.I. has won a prestigious international photography contest. And thankfully, the artist who submitted the photo came clean and said that it was completely AI-generated. I was wondering how long it was going to take for this to happen. It turns out...only a few months. You can read the original article HERE on CNN. My commentary follows (oh, and here's the picture):

Taken from the CNN article, "The eerie black and white image shows two women from different generations--the older woman appearing to hang onto the younger woman from behind." It's a remarkable photo, and it was generated in probably under a minute.

I was talking to my friend, Joseph (also a roommate) about this last night. I'm afraid that A.I. is going to take jobs...tons of jobs. And I also already realize that it has made any of my artistic skills obsolete. Like, it can now do anything I was able to do, better, faster, in greater quantity, etc. It's just nuts how fast this happened, and I'm glad that I have a real job (at least for now). I also wonder how long it will be before none of us can tell the difference between what a computer has done and what is done by a real person?

Anyone else scared of this new technology? Anyone else want to comment about it?